Composition on the topic The beginning of Gogol's literary activity “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka. Gogol's biography

Gogol's first literary experiments date back to the Nizhyn period and have not reached us. Gogol took an ardent part in the creation of handwritten lyceum journals and almanacs. So, he was the "publisher", editor and almost the only author of the journal "Northern Dawn" (the title may have gone back to " polar star Ryleev and Bestuzhev) and spent the nights preparing it. In the gymnasium, Gogol wrote the story "The Brothers Tverdislavichi", the ballad "Two Fish", a satire on the inhabitants of Nizhyn "Something about Nizhyn, or the law is not written for fools", a number of poems. In the last gymnasium years, apparently, “Idyll in pictures” was also created - “ Ganz Küchelgarten". This youthful poem is mainly inspired by book impressions, reading Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Kozlov, as well as the poetic world German romanticism and sentimentalism. The author himself declares that his "silent song" is dedicated to Germany, the "country of lofty thoughts" and "air ghosts". Against the backdrop of rural landscapes covered with a dreamy haze, the spiritual drama of the protagonist is revealed. Growing up in the silence of the village, in love with his childhood friend Louise, Hans Küchelgarten, under the influence of the books he read (Plato, Schiller Wayward, Petrarch, Tik, Aristophanes, Winckelmann) falls into secret sadness. Dreamy, contemplative romanticism is depicted in his face - and Gogol says goodbye to this romanticism in his idyll. But not with romanticism in general, because in subsequent years, having gained creative independence and originality, he continues to maintain deep ties with it. Gogol in Petersburg. After graduating from the Nizhyn gymnasium in the summer of 1828, Gogol went to St. Petersburg in December. Having neither money nor high-ranking acquaintances, he cannot find a job for a long time. Only in November 1829 was he taken to the Department of State Economy "for testing." Since April 1830, he has served as a clerk in the Department of Appanages. Gets a penny, badly in need. Unsuccessfully trying to enter the stage. Unsuccessful and the first steps in the literary field. In 1829, Gogol published "Hanz Kühelgarten" under the pseudonym V. Alov. The poem received negative reviews in magazines. Gogol took this blow hard. He bought unsold copies with the last of his money and burned them. Petersburg made a depressing impression on Gogol with its bureaucracy, commercialism, lack of spirituality, “... everything is suppressed, everything is mired in idle, insignificant labors ...” - he writes to his mother. But failure did not break the young man. He continues his literary works, sharply changing the direction of his work: he draws inspiration from Ukrainian folklore, guessing brilliantly and picking up the in-depth appeal of Russian literature to the people that had begun. Gogol fills his letters to his relatives with requests to collect and send him folk tales, songs, to report on "the customs and manners of the Little Russians", beliefs, and costumes. During 1830-1831. Several works by Gogol are published anonymously: “Basavryuk, or Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, later included in “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, a chapter from the historical novel “Hetman”, excerpts from the “Little Russian Tale” “Terrible Boar”, sketch “Woman” . At the same time, Gogol became close to prominent figures in Russian literature - Zhukovsky, Pletnev, Delvig. In May 1831, at a party at Pletnev's, he met Pushkin, whom Gogol longed for and had been looking for for a long time. Pushkin took a keen interest in the young writer, guessing his extraordinary talent. Friendship and conversations with Pushkin were of great importance for Gogol. “When I created, I saw only Pushkin in front of me ... I didn’t do anything, I didn’t write anything without his advice ...” - he will say later. He becomes his own in literary circles. In September 1835, the first, and in March 1832, the second part of "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" was published, which immediately placed Gogol in the ranks of first-class Russian writers. The romanticism of "Evenings" is vital, peculiarly "objective". Gogol poeticizes values ​​that really exist. The basis of Gogol's aesthetic ideal is the assertion of the fullness and movement of life, the beauty of human spirituality. Gogol is attracted by everything strong, bright, containing an excess of vitality. This criterion determines the character of descriptions of nature. Gogol makes them extremely, dazzlingly bright, with truly wasteful generosity figurative means . Nature is perceived by Gogol as a huge, spiritualized, "breathing" organism. The descriptions of nature are permeated with the motive of harmonic union: “... the immeasurable blue ocean, bent over the earth with a voluptuous dome, seems to have fallen asleep, all drowned in bliss, hugging and squeezing the beautiful in its airy embrace!”. In unity with the "royal" beauty of nature is the spiritual world of the author, who is experiencing a state of extreme delight and ecstasy. Therefore, the descriptions of nature in the Evenings are based on explicit or hidden parallelism: “And above everything breathes, everything is marvelous, everything is solemn. And in the soul it is both immense and wonderful, and crowds of silver visions harmoniously arise in its depths. Democracy and nationality of Gogol are also revealed in the ability to “pretend to be cute” (Belinsky) as an old beekeeper who allegedly collected and published stories, as well as other storytellers. Using the manner of a romantic "game" and "pretense", Gogol conveys the talkative, "talkative" speech of the beekeeper, his ingenuous slyness, the intricacy of the conversation with the reader. Thanks to various narrators (clerk Foma Grigoryevich, panych in a pea caftan, Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka, etc.), each of whom has his own tone and manner, the narration gets either a lyrical, or a comedy-everyday, or a legendary character, which determines the genre varieties of stories. . At the same time, "Evenings" are distinguished by unity and integrity, which are created by the image of the author. Under the guise of different narrators, a single author acts, his romantic worldview combines a lyrical-pathetic and humorous vision of life. The nature of the people of the "Evenings" helps to better understand Gogol's later articles "A Few Words about Pushkin" and "On Little Russian Songs". In his judgments about nationality, Gogol used and developed the achievements of enlightenment and romantic aesthetics. The writer called his modernity the era of "the desire for originality and actually folk poetry." Gogol's romantic aesthetics is related by the rapprochement of the folk and the national, as well as the understanding of the people as a predominantly spiritual category: "True nationality" does not consist in the description of a sundress, but in the very spirit of the people. However, Gogol goes further than the romantics: he concretizes the concept of “folk spirit” and sees the nationality of art in expressing the people’s point of view: “A poet ... can be national even when he describes a completely foreign world, but looks at it through the eyes of his national element, through the eyes of the whole people ... ". Gogol goes beyond romantic ideas and anticipates Belinsky and the realistic aesthetics of the second half of the 19th century. At the same time, in Evenings, the nationality still appears within the boundaries of the romantic art system. Without giving a comprehensive picture of folk life, "Evenings" reveal its poetry. It is no coincidence that Belinsky wrote: “Everything that nature can have is beautiful, the rural life of seductive commoners, everything that the people can have is original, typical, all this glitters with rainbow colors in these first poetic dreams of Mr. Gogol.” The people here appear in their "natural" and at the same time "festive" state. The spiritual world, the experiences of Gogol's heroes (Levka and Ganna, Gritsk and Parasky, Vakula) are marked with "the seal of pure original infancy, and therefore - and high poetry”, which the writer himself admired in the works of folklore, the image of their young love is fanned with song romance: “Galya! Galya! Are you sleeping or don't you want to come out to me?.. Don't be afraid: there is no one. The evening is warm. But if anyone showed up, I will cover you with a scroll, wrap my belt around you, cover you with my hands - and no one will see us. In "Evenings" the atmosphere of songs, dance, celebration, fair fun is poured, when the streets and roads are "boiling with people."

These biographical sketches were published about a hundred years ago in the series "The Life of Remarkable People", carried out by F.F. Pavlenkov (1839-1900). Written in the genre of poetic chronicle and historical and cultural research, which was new for that time, these texts retain their value to this day. Written "for ordinary people", for Russian province, today they can be recommended not only to bibliophiles, but to the widest readership: both to those who are not at all tempted in the history and psychology of great people, and to those for whom these subjects are a profession.

A series: Life of wonderful people

* * *

by the LitRes company.

Chapter II. Gogol's arrival in St. Petersburg and the beginning of his literary fame

Disappointment and failure - Impromptu to Lübeck. - Commencement and retirement. - The first successes in the literary field. - "Evenings on the farm." – Acquaintance with Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Karamzin. - In the circle of Nezhin comrades. - "Old World Landowners", "Taras Bulba", "Marriage", "Inspector". - Gogol in the role of an unsuccessful adjunct in the department of history. - Attraction to literature. - Belinsky predicts a glorious future for Gogol. - "Inspector" is put on stage at the personal request of Emperor Nicholas 1

Young people were very worried when approaching the capital. They, like children, constantly leaned out of the carriage to see if the lights of St. Petersburg were visible. When at last these lights flickered in the distance, their curiosity and impatience reached their highest point. Gogol even froze his nose and caught a runny nose, constantly jumping out of the carriage in order to better enjoy the longed-for spectacle. They stopped together, in furnished rooms, and immediately had to get acquainted with various practical troubles and petty annoyances that meet inexperienced provincials when they first appear in the capital. These squabbles and trifles of everyday life had a depressing effect on Gogol. In his dreams, Petersburg was a magical land where people enjoy all the material and spiritual benefits, where they do great things, wage a great fight against evil - and suddenly, instead of all this, a dirty, uncomfortable furnished room, worries about how to have a cheap lunch, anxiety at the sight of how quickly the purse is emptied, which seemed inexhaustible in Nizhyn! Things went even worse when he began to fuss about the realization of his cherished dream - to enter the public service. He brought with him several letters of recommendation to various influential persons and, of course, was sure that they would immediately open the way for him to useful and glorious activity; but, alas, here again a bitter disappointment awaited him. The “patrons” either coldly received the young, awkward provincial and limited themselves to promises, or offered him the most modest places in the lower rungs of the bureaucratic hierarchy - places that did not at all correspond to his proud plans. He tried to enter the literary field, wrote the poem "Italy" and sent it under a false name to the editors of "Son of the Fatherland". This poem, very mediocre both in content and in thought, written in a romantically pompous tone, was, however, printed. This success encouraged the young author, and he decided to publish his poem "Hans Küchelgarten" (an imitation of "Louise" Voss), conceived and, in all likelihood, even written by him in the gymnasium. Secretly from his closest friends, hiding under the pseudonym of V. Alov, he published his first large literary work(71 pages in 12 parts of a sheet), handed out copies to book sellers for a commission and, with bated breath, awaited the verdict of the public about him.

Alas! Acquaintances either said nothing at all about Hans, or spoke of him indifferently, and in the Moscow Telegraph there appeared a short but caustic remark by Polevoy that it would be best to leave the idyll of Mr. Alov under wraps forever. This first unfavorable response from critics excited Gogol to the depths of his soul.

He rushed to the bookstores, took away from the booksellers all the copies of his idyll and secretly burned them.

Another attempt to achieve fame, made by Gogol at the same time, led to the same sad results. Remembering his successes on the stage of the Nezhinsky Theater, he decided to become an actor. The then director of the theater, Prince Gagarin, instructed his official Khrapovnitsky to test him. Khrapovnitsky, an admirer of pompous recitation, found that he read too simply, inexpressively, and could only be accepted for "exit roles."

This new failure finally upset Gogol. Climate change and material deprivation, which he had to experience after a proper life in Little Russia, affected his naturally poor health, while all the troubles and disappointments were felt even more strongly; in addition, in one letter to his mother, he mentions that he fell hopelessly and passionately in love with some beauty, inaccessible to him in his own way. social standing. As a result of all these reasons, Petersburg became disgusting to him, he wanted to hide, to run away, but where? To return home, to Little Russia, having achieved nothing, having done nothing - it was unthinkable for a proud young man. Even in Nizhyn, he dreamed of a trip abroad, and now, taking advantage of the fact that a small amount of money from his mother fell into his hands, he, without thinking twice, boarded a ship and went to Lubeck.

Judging by his letters of this time, he did not associate any plans with this trip, had no specific goal, except for a little sea bathing treatment; he simply ran away from the troubles of Petersburg life in youthful impatience. Soon, however, letters from his mother and his own prudence forced him to change his mind, and after a two-month absence he returned to St. Petersburg, ashamed of his boyish antics and at the same time deciding to courageously continue the struggle for existence.

At the beginning of the next 1830, happiness finally smiled at him. His story “Basavryuk, or the Evening on the eve of Ivan Kupala” appeared in Svinin’s “Notes of the Fatherland”, and soon after he received a modest position as an assistant clerk in the department of appanages. His long-standing desire to benefit society by being in the public service has come true, but what a difference between a dream and reality! Instead of doing good to the whole state, spreading truth and goodness everywhere, eradicating lies and abuses, the modest assistant to the clerk had to copy and file boring papers about various petty matters that did not interest him at all. It is clear that the service very soon tired him, he began to treat her carelessly, often did not show up for office. Less than a year later, he was asked to retire, to which he gladly agreed: at this time literary works consumed all his thoughts. In the course of 1830 and 1831, several of his articles appeared in the then temporary publications, almost still without the author's signature: "The Teacher", "The Success of the Embassy", an excerpt from the novel "Hetman", "A Few Thoughts on the Teaching of Geography", "Woman". In the midst of the cold and uneasiness of Petersburg life, his thoughts involuntarily rushed to his native Little Russia; a circle of Nizhyn comrades, with whom he maintained a friendly relationship from the very arrival, shared and supported his sympathies. Every week they got together, talked about their dear Ukraine, sang Little Russian songs, treated each other to Little Russian dishes, reminisced about their schoolboy tricks and their merry trips home for the holidays.

Singing doors, earthen floors, low rooms lit by a stub in an old candlestick, roofs covered with green mold, cloudy oaks, virgin thickets of bird cherry and sweet cherry, yachontic seas of plums, intoxicatingly luxurious summer days, dreamy yesterdays, clear winter nights - all these from childhood familiar native images again resurrected in Gogol's imagination and asked to be poured into poetic works. By May 1931, he had ready stories that made up the first volume of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

At the beginning of 1931, Gogol met Zhukovsky, who treated the novice writer with his usual kindness and warmly recommended him to Pletnev. Pletnev looked at his literary work with great sympathy, advised him to publish the first collection of his stories under a pseudonym, and himself invented a title for it, calculated to arouse public interest. In order to provide Gogol financially, Pletnev, who at that time was an inspector of the Patriotic Institute, gave him the position of senior teacher of history at this institute and provided him with lessons in several aristocratic families. For the first time, Gogol was introduced to the circle of writers in 1832 at a holiday, which was given by the famous bookseller Smirdin on the occasion of the transfer of his store to a new apartment. The guests presented the host with various articles that made up the almanac "Housewarming", which also contains Gogolev's "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich."

Gogol met Pushkin in the summer of 1831. Thanks to him and Zhukovsky, he was introduced to the Karamzins' living room, which constituted, as it were, a link between the literary and court-aristocratic circles, and met Prince Vyazemsky, the family of Count Vielgorsky, and the ladies-in-waiting, whose beauty was considered to be Alexandra Osipovna Rosseti, later Smirnova. All these acquaintances could not help but have an influence on Gogol, and a very strong influence. The young man, who had meager worldly experience and even meager theoretical knowledge, had to submit to the charm of more developed and educated people. Zhukovsky, Pushkin - there were names that he used to pronounce with reverence from childhood; when he saw that these names hide not only great writers, but truly kind people, who received him with the most sincere friendliness, he became attached to them with all his heart, he willingly accepted their ideas, and these ideas formed the basis of his own world outlook. In relation to politics, the convictions of the literary-aristocratic circle in which Gogol had to move can be characterized by the word: liberal-conservative. All fundamental reforms of the Russian way of life and the monarchical system of Russia were unconditionally rejected by him, as absurd and harmful, and yet the constraints imposed by this system on individuals revolted him; he wanted more scope for the development of individual abilities and activities, more freedom for individual estates and institutions; all abuses of bureaucratic arbitrariness met with his condemnation, but he rejected both an energetic protest against these abuses and any search for their root cause. However, it must be said that political and social questions never came to the fore in that brilliant society that gathered in the Karamzins' drawing room and grouped around the two great poets. Zhukovsky, both as a poet and as a person, shunned questions that agitated life, leading to doubt or denial. Pushkin spoke with disdain about the "pathetic skeptical thinking of the last century" and about the "harmful dreams" that exist in Russian society, and he himself rarely indulged in such dreams.

End of introductory segment.

* * *

The following excerpt from the book Gogol. His life and literary activity (A. N. Annenskaya) provided by our book partner -

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Literary biography

Life and literary activity

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809 - 1852) - one of the greatest writers of Russian literature. He was born on March 19, 1809 in the town of Sorochintsy (on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod districts) and came from an old Little Russian family. Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich, left the spiritual career and entered the hetman's office; it was he who added to his surname Yanovsky another - Gogol, which was supposed to demonstrate the origin of the family from the well-known in Ukrainian history of the 17th century. Colonel Evstafy (Ostap) Gogol (this fact, however, does not find sufficient confirmation). Grandfather wrote in an official paper that “his ancestors, by the name of Gogol, were of the Polish nation,” although he himself was a real Little Russian and some considered him the prototype of the hero of the “Old World Landowners”. The writer's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, served at the Little Russian Post Office. Mother, Marya Ivanovna, who married Vasily Afanasyevich at the age of fourteen, came from the Kosyarovsky landlord family and was known as the first beauty in the Poltava region. In the family, in addition to Nikolai, there were five more children. The future writer spent his childhood in his native estate Vasilyevka (another name is Yanovshchina), visiting with his parents the surrounding places - Dikanka, which belonged to the Minister of Internal Affairs V.P. Kochubey, Obukhovka, where the writer V.V. Kapnist lived, but especially often in Kibintsy, estate former minister, a distant relative of Gogol on his mother's side - D. P. Troshchinsky. The early artistic impressions of the future writer are connected with Kibintsy, where there was an extensive library and a home theater. Another source of strong feelings for the boy were historical legends and biblical stories, in particular, the prophecy about the Last Judgment told by his mother with a reminder of the inevitable punishment of sinners. Since then, Gogol, in the words of the researcher K. V. Mochulsky, constantly lived “under the terror of the afterlife retribution.” Gogol's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, was a man of a cheerful nature and a wonderful storyteller, his stage activity influenced the tastes of the future writer, who showed an early penchant for the theater. V. A. Gogol died when his son was 15 years old. Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of Little Russian life, pan and peasant. It was these impressions that served as the basis for Gogol's later Little Russian stories, his historical and ethnographic interests. Subsequently, while living in St. Petersburg, Gogol constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his Little Russian stories. The influence of the mother is attributed to the inclinations of religiosity, which subsequently took possession of the whole being of the writer. Mother adored Gogol and greatly spoiled him, which became one of the sources of his conceit, the writer early realized the genius power hidden in him.

In 1818 - 1819. Gogol studied at the Poltava district school, then took private lessons from the Poltava teacher Gabriel Sorochinsky. From May 1821 to June 1828 the writer studied at the gymnasium of higher sciences in Nizhyn. He was not a diligent student, but he had an excellent memory and prepared for exams in just a few days. Gogol was very weak in languages ​​and made progress only in drawing and Russian literature. The gymnasium of higher sciences, where Gogol studied, was poorly organized at that time. The teacher of literature was an admirer of Kheraskov and Derzhavin and an enemy of the latest poetry, especially Pushkin. Gogol made up for the shortcomings of the school by self-education in a friendly circle. Gogol, along with Vysotsky, who at that time had considerable influence on the writer; with A. S. Danilevsky and N. Prokopovich, who remained his friends for life; with Nestor Kukolnik subscribed to magazines. They even started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in verse. Nikolai Vasilyevich was very witty and even then he was distinguished by unusual comedy. Along with literary interests, a love for the theater also developed. He was the most zealous participant. In his youth, he admired Pushkin, but his writing experiments developed in the style of romantic rhetoric, in the taste of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.

The death of his father was a heavy blow to the entire family. Sharing his mother's concerns about family affairs, Gogol also thinks about the future organization of his own affairs. By the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of a wide social activity, which, however, he does not see at all in the literary field; he thinks of moving forward and benefiting society in the service, in the field of justice, for which in fact he was completely incapable.

After graduating from the gymnasium, in December 1828, Gogol, together with one of his closest friends, A. S. Danilevsky, went to St. Petersburg, where he was severely disappointed: his modest means turned out to be very meager in the big city; brilliant hopes were not realized as soon as he expected. He tried to enter the stage, become an official, devote himself to literature, but he was not accepted as an actor; he was tired of the service. He became more attracted to the literary field. In St. Petersburg, he took part in the Little Russian circle, which consisted partly of former comrades. He found that Little Russia arouses interest in society; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native Little Russia, and from here appeared “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”. But before that, under the pseudonym of V. Alov, he published that romantic idyll “Hanz Küchelgarten” (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it in 1827) and the hero of which was given those ideal dreams and aspirations, which he himself was fulfilled in last years of Nizhyn life. But his work meets with murderous responses from reviewers (Gogol immediately buys up almost the entire print run of the book and sets it on fire); to this, perhaps, love experiences were added, which he spoke about in a letter to his mother (dated July 24, 1829). The restless search for a life's work and personal troubles force Gogol to suddenly leave St. Petersburg for Germany. Gogol went by sea to Lübeck, but a month later he returned to St. Petersburg again (in September 1829). “He was drawn to some fantastic country of happiness and reasonable productive labor,” says his biographer; America seemed to him to be such a country. In fact, instead of America, he got into the service of the department of appanages (April, 1830) and remained there until 1832. His further fate and his literary activity were influenced by the rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin.

"Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka"

The failure of Hanz Küchelgarten was already some indication of the need for another literary path; but even earlier, from the first months of 1828, Gogol besieged his mother with requests to send him information about Little Russian customs, traditions, costumes, as well as to send “notes kept by the ancestors of some ancient family, ancient manuscripts”, etc. All this there was material for future stories from Little Russian life and legends, which became the first beginning of his literary glory. This time was the most active era of his work, his first major literary work, which marked the beginning of his fame. At the beginning of 1830, in the old “Notes of the Fatherland”, Svinin was published with corrections from the editors “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. Stories published by the beekeeper Rudy Pank”, published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (the first included “Sorochinsky Fair”, “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”, “The Missing Letter” ; in the second - "The Night Before Christmas", "A Terrible Revenge, an Old True Story", "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt", "The Enchanted Place"), saturated with Ukrainian ethnographic and folklore material, marked by romantic moods, lyricism and humor. These stories, depicting pictures of Little Russian life in an unprecedented way, shining with gaiety and subtle humor, made a huge impression on Pushkin: “Here is real gaiety, sincere, unconstrained, without affectation, without stiffness. And in some places, what poetry!...” At the same time, the “gaiety” of Gogol's book revealed various shades - from carefree banter to gloomy comedy, close to black humor. With all the fullness and sincerity of the feelings of Gogol's characters, the world in which they live is tragically conflicted: natural and family ties are being terminated, mysterious unreal forces invade the natural order of things (fantastic relies mainly on folk demonology). Already in “Evenings...” Gogol's extraordinary art of creating an integral, complete and living according to its own laws artistic cosmos was manifested. After the release of the first prose book, Gogol became a famous writer.

Gogol published other works then in the publications of Baron Delvig, Literary Gazette and Northern Flowers, where a chapter from the historical novel Hetman was placed. Delvig recommended Gogol to Zhukovsky, who received the writer with great cordiality, the mutual sympathy of people who were kindred in love for art, in religiosity, prone to mysticism, affected from the first time - after that they became very close. Zhukovsky, in turn, recommended the young man to Pletnev, and in February 1831 Pletnev proposed Gogol's candidacy for the post of teacher at the Patriotic Institute, where he himself was an inspector. Thanks to Pletnev, in May of the same year, Gogol entered Pushkin's circle, where his great beginning talent was soon appreciated. This recognition greatly influenced his entire life. Before Gogol, the prospect of a wide activity, which he dreamed of, was revealed - but in the field not of service, but of literature. In the new environment, Gogol entered the circle of people who stood at the head of Russian fiction, Pushkin's personality made an extraordinary impression on him and forever remained an object of worship for him. Now his old poetic aspirations could develop in all their breadth. Service to art became for him a high and strict moral duty, the requirements of which he tried to fulfill sacredly. Hence his slow manner of work, the long definition and development of the plan and all the details. The company of people with a broad literary education was generally useful for a young man with very meager knowledge taken out of school: his observation becomes deeper, and artistic creativity increased with each new work. At Zhukovsky, Gogol met a select circle, partly literary, partly aristocratic. The horizon of his life observations was expanding, long-standing aspirations were gaining ground, and Gogol's lofty conception of his destiny was already falling into extreme conceit: on the one hand, his mood became sublime idealism, on the other, the possibility of those profound mistakes arose, which marked the last years of his life. life.

The realistic period of Gogol's work

"Mirgorod", "Arabesques"

The year 1835 is unusual in terms of the creative intensity and breadth of Gogol's ideas. The next collections were first "Arabesques", then "Mirgorod", opening the realistic period of Gogol's work. Both works appeared in 1835. They were compiled partly from articles published in 1830-1834, partly from new works that appeared here for the first time. Gogol's literary fame has now been finally established. He grew up in the eyes of his inner circle, and especially in the sympathy of the younger literary generation; it already guessed in him great power which is to make a revolution in the course of our literature. In the meantime, events were taking place in the writer's personal life that influenced the internal warehouse of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he was at home for the first time after completing a course in Nizhyn. The path lay through Moscow, where he met people who later became his more or less close friends: Pogodin, Maksimovich, Shchepkin, S. T. Aksakov. Staying at home first surrounded him with impressions of his beloved environment, memories of the past, but then with severe disappointments. Household affairs were upset; Gogol himself was no longer the enthusiastic youth he had left his homeland: life experience taught him to look deeper into reality and see its often sad, even tragic basis behind its outer shell. Soon his "Evenings" began to seem to him a superficial youthful experience, the fruit of that "youth during which no questions come to mind." Little Russian life even now provided material for his imagination, but the mood was already different: in the stories of Mirgorod this sad note constantly sounds, reaching high pathos. Returning to St. Petersburg, Gogol worked hard on his works: this was generally the most active time of his creative activity; he continued, at the same time, to make plans for life. From the end of 1833, he was carried away by an idea as unrealizable as his previous plans for the service were: it seemed to him that he could enter the scientific field. He dreamed of taking the chair of the history of Kyiv University there, the opening of which was being prepared at that time. In Kyiv, he thought of writing something unprecedented in world history, and at the same time studying Little Russian antiquity. To his chagrin, it turned out that the chair of history had been given to another person; but soon, thanks to the influence of his high literary friends, he was offered the same department at St. Petersburg University. Gogol really occupied this chair; once or twice he managed to give an effective lecture, but then the task proved beyond his strength, and he himself resigned from the professorship in 1835. It was, of course, a great presumption; but his guilt was not so great, if we remember that Gogol's plans did not seem strange either to his friends, among whom were Pogodin and Maksimovich, or to the Ministry of Education, which found it possible to give a professorship to a young man who had finished the course of the gymnasium with sin in half; the entire level of university science at that time was still so low.

In 1835, Gogol published “Arabesques” (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835), where several articles of popular scientific content on history and art were placed (“Sculpture, Painting and Music”; a few words about Pushkin; about architecture; about Bryullov’s painting; about teaching general history; a look at the state of Little Russia; about Little Russian songs, etc.), but at the same time new stories: “Portrait”, “Nevsky Prospekt” and “Notes of a Madman”. Then in the same year “Mirgorod. Tales that serve as a continuation of Evenings on a farm near Dikanka” (two hours, St. Petersburg, 1835). Here was placed whole line works that revealed new striking features of his talent. In the first part of "Mirgorod" appeared "Old World Landowners" and "Taras Bulba"; in the second - “Viy” and the Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich. In Gogol's work there is abrupt change perspective and pictorial scale: instead of strong and harsh characteristics - the vulgarity and facelessness of the townsfolk; instead of poetic and deep feelings - sluggish, almost reflex movements. The ordinariness of modern life was set off by the colorfulness and extravagance of the past, but the more strikingly manifested in it, in this past, deep internal conflict (for example, in “Taras Bulba” - a clash of an individualized love feeling with communal interests). "Taras Bulba" appeared here in the first essay, which was developed by the writer later (1842) on a much wider scale. The world of “Petersburg stories” from “Arabesques” (“Nevsky Prospekt”, “Notes of a Madman”, “Portrait”; they are adjoined by “The Nose” and “The Overcoat” published later, respectively in 1836 and 1842) is the world of the modern city with its sharp social and ethical conflicts, character breaks, disturbing and ghostly atmosphere. These works appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836) and Pletnev (1842) and in the first collected works (1842); a later stay in Italy includes "Rome" in Pogodin's "Moskvityanin" (1842).

"Inspector"

By 1834, the first concept of the “Inspector General” is also attributed. The surviving manuscripts of Gogol indicate that he worked extremely carefully on his works: from what has survived from these manuscripts, it is clear how the work in its finished form known to us grew gradually from the original sketch, becoming more and more complicated with details and finally reaching that amazing artistic fullness and vitality, with which we know, the writer's creative process sometimes dragged on for years. The first printed form of comedy appeared in 1836.

It is known that the main plot of The Inspector General, as well as the plot of “ dead souls”, was prompted by Pushkin to Gogol, the anecdote, told in a few lines, turned into a rich work of art in which Gogol's generalization reaches its highest degree. The “prefabricated city” in this work, as it were, imitated the life of any larger social association, up to the state, Russian Empire or even humanity as a whole. Instead of the traditional active engine of intrigue - a rogue or an adventurer - an involuntary deceiver (the imaginary auditor Khlestakov) was placed at the epicenter of the conflict, which gave everything that happened an additional, grotesque illumination, amplified to the limit by the final “silent scene”. Freed from the specific details of the “punishment of vice”, conveying, first of all, the very effect of a general shock (which was emphasized by the symbolic duration of the moment of petrification), this scene opened up the possibility of a variety of interpretations, including even its interpretation as a reminder of the coming Last Judgment.

The old passion for the theater took possession of Gogol to an extraordinary degree: the comedy never left his head; he was fascinated by the idea of ​​being face to face with society; he strove with the greatest care that the play be performed in full accordance with his own idea of ​​characters and action; the production met with various obstacles, including censorship, and was finally realized only at the behest of Emperor Nicholas. The Inspector General had an extraordinary effect: the Russian stage had never seen anything like it; the reality of Russian life was conveyed by the writer with such force and truth that although, as Gogol himself said, it was only about six provincial officials who turned out to be rogues, the whole society rebelled against him, which felt that it was about a whole principle, about a whole the order of life in which it itself exists. But, on the other hand, the comedy was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by those best part of society, those who were aware of the existence of these shortcomings and the need for denunciation, and especially by the young literary generation, who saw here once again, as in the previous works of their beloved writer, a whole revelation, a new, emerging period of Russian art and Russian society. Reporting on the writer's new creations, including the forthcoming premiere of The Inspector General at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg (April 19, 1836), Pushkin noted in his Sovremennik: “Mr. Gogol is still moving forward. We wish and hope to have the opportunity to speak about him often in our magazine.” By the way, Gogol also actively published in Pushkin's journal, in particular, as a critic (the article "On the Movement of Journal Literature in 1834 and 1835").

Gogol wanted honesty and truth to become the order of things, and he was especially struck by the cries of condemnation that rose up against him. Subsequently, in “Theatrical tour after the presentation of a new comedy”, on the one hand, he conveyed the impression that the “Inspector General” made in various sectors of society, and on the other hand, he expressed his own thoughts about the great significance of theater and artistic truth.

The first dramatic plans came to the writer even earlier than The Inspector General. In 1833, he was absorbed in the comedy "Vladimir of the 3rd degree"; it was not completed by him, but its material served for several dramatic episodes, such as "Morning of a Businessman", "Litigation", "Lakey's" and "Fragment". The first of these plays appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836), the rest in his first collected works (1842). In the same meeting appeared for the first time "Marriage", the first drafts of which date back to the same 1833, and "Players", conceived in the mid-thirties. Tired of the intensified work of recent years and the moral anxieties that The Government Inspector had cost him, Gogol decided to rest away from this crowd of society, under a different sky.

"Dead Souls"

In June 1836, Gogol, together with A. Danilevsky, went abroad, where he later stayed, with interruptions in his visits to Russia, for many years. Staying in the “beautiful far away” for the first time strengthened and calmed him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, “Dead Souls”, but this ultimately led Gogol to dissociation from life, to an increased withdrawal into himself and exaltation of religious feeling. Gogol wrote the last book, which amounted, as it were, to a denial of his own artistic work ... Having gone abroad, he lived in Germany, Switzerland, spent the winter with A. Danilevsky in Paris. There he was caught by the news of Pushkin's death, which struck him terribly. In March 1837, he was in Rome, which he fell extremely fond of and became for him, as it were, a second home. European political and social life has always remained alien to Gogol. He was attracted by nature and works of art, he studied ancient monuments, art galleries, visited the workshops of artists, admired folk life and loved to show Rome, "treat" them to visiting Russian acquaintances and friends. But in Rome he worked hard: the main subject of this work was Dead Souls, conceived back in St. Petersburg in 1835; here, in Rome, he finished "The Overcoat", wrote the story "Anunziata", later altered into "Rome", wrote a tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, which, after several alterations, he destroyed. The generalization of scale characteristic of Gogol now received a spatial expression: as the Chichikov scam developed (purchasing the “revision souls” of dead people), Russian life was to be revealed in many ways - not only from the side of its “lower ranks”, but also in higher, significant manifestations. At the same time, the entire depth of the key motive of the poem was revealed: the concept of “dead soul” and the antithesis “living” - “dead” that followed from this, from the sphere of concrete word usage (the deceased peasant, “revision soul”) moved into the sphere of figurative and symbolic semantics. The problem arose of the mortification and revival of the human soul, and in connection with this - of society as a whole, the Russian world first of all, but through it and everything modern humanity. The complexity of the idea is related to the genre specificity of "Dead Souls" (the designation "poem" indicated symbolic meaning works, the special role of the narrator and the positive authorial ideal).

In the autumn of 1839, together with Pogodin, he went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was greeted with enthusiasm by the Aksakovs. Then he went to Petersburg, where he had to pick up the sisters from the institute; then he returned to Moscow again; in St. Petersburg and Moscow he read the completed chapters of Dead Souls to his closest friends. Having arranged his affairs in his homeland, Gogol again went abroad, to his beloved Rome; he promised his friends to return in a year and bring the finished first volume of Dead Souls. By the summer of 1841 this first volume was ready. In September of this year, the writer went to Russia to print his book. He again had to endure the severe anxieties that he once experienced when staging The Inspector General. The book was first presented to the Moscow censorship, which was going to ban it altogether; then it was submitted to St. Petersburg censorship and, thanks to the participation of influential friends of Gogol, was allowed, with some exceptions. She was published in Moscow (“The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, a poem by N. G.”, M. 1842).

The second volume of "Dead Souls", "Selected passages from correspondence with friends"

In June 1841 Gogol went abroad again. This last stay abroad was the final turning point in the writer's state of mind. He lived first in Rome, then in Germany, in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, then in Nice, then in Paris, then in Ostend, often in the circle of his closest friends, Zhukovsky, Smirnova, Vielgorsky, Tolstoy, and the pietistic direction developed more and more in him. . A lofty idea of ​​his talent and the duty that lay with him led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to expose human vices and look at life broadly, one must strive for inner perfection, which is given only by contemplation of God. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which still increased his religious mood; in his circle he found a favorable ground for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently instructed his friends, and finally came to the conclusion that what he had done so far was unworthy of the lofty goal to which he now considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem is nothing more than a porch to the palace that is being built in it, now he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high mission.

After the publication of the first volume (1842), work on the second volume (begun in 1840) proceeded with particular intensity and pain. In the summer of 1845, in a difficult state of mind, Gogol burned the manuscript of this volume, later explaining his decision precisely by the fact that the “ways and roads” to the ideal, the revival of the human spirit, did not receive a sufficiently truthful and convincing expression. He offered it as a sacrifice to God, and the new content of the book presented itself to his mind, enlightened and purified; it seemed to him that he now understood how to write in order to “direct the whole society towards the beautiful”

started new job, but in the meantime another thought occupied him: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful to him, and he decided to collect in one book everything he had written in recent years to friends in the spirit of his new mood and instructed Pletnev to publish this book. These were “Selected passages from correspondence with friends” (St. Petersburg, 1847). Most of the letters that make up this book date from 1845 and 1846, the time when this mood of Gogol reached its highest development. As if compensating for the long-promised second volume and anticipating general movement sense of the poem, Gogol in "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" (1847) turned to a more direct, journalistic explanation of his ideas. The book made a heavy impression even on the poet's personal friends with its tone of prophecy and teaching, preaching humility, condemning previous works, in which Russian literature saw one of its best ornaments; complete approval of those social orders, the failure of which was clear to enlightened people without distinction of parties. But the impression of the book on literary admirers of Gogol was depressing. The highest degree of indignation aroused by Selected Places was expressed in Belinsky's well-known (unpublished in Russia) letter, to which Gogol was unable to answer. Apparently, he was not fully aware of this meaning of his book. He partly explained the attacks on her by his own mistake, an exaggeration of the teacher's tone, and by the fact that the censors did not miss several important letters in the book; but he could explain the attacks of former literary adherents only by the calculations of parties and self-esteem. public sense this controversy eluded him; he himself, having long since left Russia, kept those indefinite social concepts , which he acquired in the old Pushkin circle, was alien to the literary and social ferment that had arisen since then and saw in it only the ephemeral disputes of writers. In a similar sense, he then wrote “Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls”; “The Examiner’s Denouement”, where he wanted to give a free artistic creation the strained character of some kind of moralizing allegory, and “Forewarning”, where it was announced that the fourth and fifth editions of the Inspector General would be sold in favor of the poor ... The failure of the book produced an overwhelming effect on Gogol action. He had to confess that a mistake had been made; even friends, like S. T. Aksakov, told him that the mistake was gross and pitiful; he himself confessed to Zhukovsky: “I swung in my book with such Khlestakov that I don’t have the spirit to look into it.” In his letters from 1847 there is no longer the former arrogant tone of preaching and teaching. Religious feeling remained his refuge: he decided that he could not continue his work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to bow to the Holy Sepulcher. At the end of 1847 he moved to Naples and at the beginning of 1848 sailed to Palestine, from where he finally returned to Russia via Constantinople and Odessa. The stay in Jerusalem did not produce the effect he expected. “Never before have I been so little satisfied with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” he says. “It was as if I was at the Holy Sepulcher in order to feel there on the spot how much coldness of the heart is in me, how much selfishness and pride.” Gogol calls his impressions of Palestine sleepy; caught in the rain one day in Nazareth, he thought he was just sitting in Russia at the station. He spent the end of spring and summer in the village with his mother, and on September 1 he moved to Moscow; he spent the summer of 1849 with Smirnova in the countryside and in Kaluga, where Smirnova's husband was governor; in the summer of 1850 he lived again with his family; then he lived for some time in Odessa, was once again at home, and in the autumn of 1851 he settled again in Moscow, where he lived in the house of c. A.P. Tolstoy. He continued to work on the second volume of Dead Souls and read excerpts from it from the Aksakovs, but it continued the same painful struggle between the artist and the pietist that had been going on in him since the early forties. As was his wont, he redid what he had written many times, probably succumbing to one or another mood. By the beginning of 1852, the edition of the second volume was re-created, chapters from which Gogol read to his closest friends - A. O. Smirnova-Rosset, S. P. Shevyrev, M. P. Pogodin, S. T. Aksakov and members of his family and others. The Rzhev archpriest Father Matvey (Konstantinovsky), whose preaching of rigorism and tireless moral self-improvement largely determined Gogol’s mindset in many respects, disapproved of the work. last period his life. Meanwhile, his health was getting weaker and weaker; in January 1852, he was struck by the death of Khomyakov's wife, who was the sister of his friend Yazykov; he was seized by the fear of death; he threw literary pursuits, began to fast at Shrove Tuesday; One day, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die. One night, in the midst of religious contemplation, he was seized by religious horror and doubt that he had not so fulfilled the duty imposed on him by God; he woke the servant, ordered him to open the chimney of the fireplace, and taking the papers from the briefcase, burned them. In the morning, when his consciousness cleared up, he repentantly told Tolstoy about this and believed that this was done under the influence of an evil spirit; since then he fell into a gloomy despondency and a few days later, on February 21, 1852, he died.

The funeral of the writer took place with a huge gathering of people at the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery (in 1931, Gogol's remains were reburied at the Novodevichy cemetery).

The historical significance of Gogol

The study of the historical significance of Gogol has not been completed to this day. Gogol's work to this day is of great interest all over the world. Studying the facts of Gogol's activity, one can distinguish two periods in his work: the first period served the progressive aspirations of society, and the second sided with immovable conservatism. But a careful study of Gogol's biography, especially his correspondence, which reveals his inner life, shows that no matter how opposite the motives of his stories, The Inspector General and Dead Souls, on the one hand, and Selected Places, on the other, in the personality of the writer there was not that turning point that was supposed to be in it, one direction was not abandoned and another, opposite, was adopted; on the contrary, it was one whole inner life, where already at an early time there were the makings of later phenomena, where the main feature of this life did not stop - service to art; but this personal life was broken by the contradictions with which she had to reckon in the spiritual principles of life and in reality. Gogol was not a thinker, but he was a great artist. About the properties of his talent, he himself said: “The only thing that came out well for me was what was taken by me from reality, from data known to me” ... “My imagination still has not given me a single wonderful character and has not created any one such thing that my gaze in nature did not notice somewhere. It could not have been easier and stronger to indicate the deep foundation of realism that lay in his talent; but the great property of his talent lay in the fact that he erected these features of reality "into the pearl of creation." And the faces depicted by him were not a repetition of reality: they were whole artistic types in which human nature was deeply understood. His heroes, as rarely in any other Russian writer, became common nouns, and before him there was no example in our literature that in the most modest human existence such an amazing inner life was revealed. Another personal trait of Gogol was that from the very early years , from the first glimpses of his young consciousness, he was excited by lofty aspirations, the desire to serve society with something lofty and beneficial; from an early age he hated a limited self-satisfaction, devoid of inner content, and this trait later, in the thirties, showed itself with a conscious desire to denounce social ulcers and corruption, and it also developed into a lofty idea of ​​the significance of art, standing above the crowd as the highest enlightenment of the ideal. .. But Gogol was a man of his time and society. He took little out of school; no wonder that the young man did not have a certain way of thinking; but for this there was no deposit in his further education. His opinions on the fundamental questions of morality and social life remained even now patriarchal and simple-hearted. A powerful talent matured in him - his feeling and observation penetrated deeply into life phenomena - but his thought did not dwell on the causes of these phenomena. He was early filled with a generous and noble desire for the human good, sympathy for human suffering; he found for their expression sublime poetic language, deep humor and stunning pictures; but these aspirations remained at the level of feeling, artistic insight, ideal abstraction - in the sense that, with all their strength, Gogol did not translate them into the practical idea of ​​improving the social, and when they began to show him a different point of view, he could no longer understand it .. All of Gogol's fundamental ideas about life and literature were the ideas of Pushkin's circle. Gogol entered it as a young man, and the people of this circle were already people of mature development, a more extensive education, a significant position in society; Pushkin and Zhukovsky were at the height of their poetic fame. The old legends of Arzamas developed into a cult of abstract art. The circle bowed before the name of Karamzin, was carried away by the glory of Russia, believed in its future greatness, had no doubts about the present, and, indignant at shortcomings that could not be overlooked, attributed them only to a lack of virtue in people, to the failure to comply with laws. By the end of the thirties, even during Pushkin's lifetime, a turn began, showing that his school had ceased to satisfy the new aspirations of society that had arisen. Later, the circle more and more retired from new trends and was at enmity with them; according to his ideas, literature should have hovered in lofty regions, shunned the prose of life, stood “above” social noise and struggle: this condition could only make its field one-sided and not very wide. .. The artistic feeling of the circle was, however, strong and appreciated the unique talent of Gogol, the circle also took care of his personal affairs ...

The sharpest moment of the collision of Gogol's theoretical ideas with reality and the aspirations of the enlightened part of society was Belinsky's letter; but it was already too late, and the last years of Gogol's life passed, as has been said, in a hard and fruitless struggle between the artist and the pietist. This internal struggle of the writer is not only of interest to the personal fate of one of the greatest writers of Russian literature, but also to the wide interest of a socio-historical phenomenon: the struggle of moral and social elements - the prevailing conservatism, and the demands of personal and social freedom and justice, was reflected in Gogol's personality and activities, struggle of old tradition and critical thought, pietism and free art. For the writer himself, this struggle remained unresolved; he was broken by this internal discord, but, nevertheless, the significance of Gogol's main works for literature was extremely deep, which is reflected in all subsequent literature. Apart from the purely artistic merits of performance, which after Pushkin still raised the level of possible artistic perfection in later writers, his deep psychological analysis was unparalleled in previous literature and opened up a wide path of observations, of which so many were made later. Even his first works, so severely later condemned by him "Evenings", no doubt, contributed a lot to strengthening that loving attitude towards the people, which developed so subsequently. The "Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" were again, hitherto unknown in this measure, a fiery protest against the insignificance and corruption of public life; this protest broke out of personal moral idealism, had no definite theoretical basis, but this did not prevent it from making a striking impression on the moral and social side.

The main thing in Gogol's work was reflected in that bright new feature of the content, which before him, to this extent, did not exist in literature. Gogol was a profound expression of the aspirations of his time and society. One artistic merit it is impossible to explain either the enthusiasm with which his works were received by the younger generations, or the hatred with which they were met in the conservative crowd of society. The internal tragedy in which Gogol spent the last years of his life is explained by the contradiction between his theoretical worldview, his repentant conservatism, and the extraordinary social influence of his works, which he did not expect or imagine. Gogol's works coincided with the birth of this social interest, to which they greatly served and from which literature no longer emerged. The great significance of Gogol is also confirmed by negative facts. In 1852, for a small article in memory of Gogol, Turgenev was arrested in part; the censors were ordered to strictly censor everything written about Gogol; there was even a complete ban on talking about him. The second edition of the "Works", begun in 1851 by Gogol himself and not completed due to these censorship obstacles, could only be published in 1855-1856. The connection of the writer with subsequent literature is beyond doubt. Gogol was of great importance to the work of Turgenev. His "Notes of a Hunter" seem to be a continuation of "Dead Souls". The "spirit of humanity" that distinguishes the works of Turgenev and other writers new era, in the environment of Russian literature, no one was brought up more than Gogol, for example, in “The Overcoat”, “Notes of a Madman”, “Dead Souls”. Similarly, the depiction of the negative aspects of landowner life comes down to Gogol. The first work of Dostoevsky is also adjacent to Gogol. In their later activities, the new writers made independent contributions to the content of literature, life posed and developed new questions, but the first impetus was given by Gogol.

By the way, definitions of Gogol were made from the point of view of his Little Russian origin: the latter explained, to a certain extent, his attitude towards Russian (Great Russian) life. Gogol's attachment to his homeland, Little Russia, was very strong, especially in the first years of his literary activity and up to the completion of the second edition of Taras Bulba, but the satirical attitude to Russian life, no doubt, is explained not by his national properties, but by his whole character. internal development. There is no doubt, however, that the traits of his people also affected the nature of Gogol's talent. These are the features of his humor, which still remains the only one of its kind in our literature. The two main Slavic branches happily merged in this talent into one, highly remarkable phenomenon.

In the historical perspective, Gogol's creativity was revealed gradually, exposing its deeper levels with the passage of time. For its immediate successors, representatives of the so-called natural school, social motives, the lifting of all prohibitions on the topic and material, everyday concreteness, as well as humanistic pathos in the depiction of the “little man” were of paramount importance. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Christian philosophical and moral problems of Gogol's works were revealed with particular force; subsequently, the perception of Gogol's work was supplemented by a sense of the special complexity and irrationality of his artistic world and the visionary courage and unconventionality of his pictorial manner. “Gogol's prose is at least four-dimensional. He can be compared with his contemporary mathematician Lobachevsky, who blew up the Euclidean world...” (V. Nabokov). All this determined the huge and ever-increasing role of Gogol in modern world culture.

Nicholas VasilevichGogol Selected places from... it's early activity, a journalist, busy with ... European languages. All literarylife Zhukovsky was like ... how it is inscribed biography Fonvizina, written ...

Gogol was born on March 20 (April 1), 1809 in the town of Velikie Sorochintsy, Mirgorod povet (district) of the Poltava province, in the very heart of Little Russia, as Ukraine was then called. The Gogoli-Yanovskys were a typical landlord family, owning 1,000 acres of land and 400 souls of serfs. The future writer spent his childhood years in the parental estate of Vasilievka. It was located in the Mirgorod district next to the legendary Dikanka, whose name the writer immortalized in his first book.

In 1818, Gogol, together with his brother Ivan, studied for a little over a year at the Mirgorod district school. After the death of his brother, his father took him from the school and prepared him to enter the local gymnasium. However, it was decided to send Gogol to the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in the city of Nizhyn in the neighboring Chernihiv province, where he studied for seven years - from 1821 to 1828. Here Gogol first got acquainted with modern literature, became interested in theater. His first literary experiments also belong to the time of his stay at the gymnasium.

A test of an immature pen was the "idyll in pictures" "Hanz Kühelgarten", an imitative romantic work. But it was on him that the novice writer placed special hopes. Arriving at the end of 1828 in St. Petersburg "to look for a place" for an official, Gogol was inspired by a secret thought: to establish himself on the St. Petersburg literary Olympus, to stand next to the first writers of that time - A.S. Pushkin, V.A. Zhukovsky, A.A. Delvig.

Already two months after his arrival in St. Petersburg, Gogol published (without giving a name) a romantic poem "Italy" ("Son of the Fatherland and the Northern Archive", vol. 2, No. 12). And in June 1829, the young provincial, extremely ambitious and arrogant, published the poem "Hanz Küchelgarten" taken from a suitcase, spending most of his parents' money on it. The book was published under the "talking" pseudonym V. Alov, hinting at the author's great hopes. However, they did not materialize: the reviews for the publication of the poem were negative. Shocked, Gogol left for Germany, but first he took all copies of the book from bookstores and burned them. The literary debut turned out to be unsuccessful, and the nervous, suspicious, painfully conceited debutant for the first time showed that attitude towards failures, which would then be repeated all his life: burning manuscripts and fleeing abroad after another "failure".

Returning from abroad at the end of 1829, Gogol entered the civil service - he became an ordinary Petersburg official. The pinnacle of Gogol's bureaucratic career was the assistant clerk in the Department of Appanages. In 1831, he left the hated office and, thanks to the patronage of new friends - V.A. Zhukovsky and P.A. Pletnev - entered the pedagogical field: he became a teacher of history at the Patriotic Institute, and in 1834-1835. He served as an adjunct professor in the Department of World History at St. Petersburg University. However, in the foreground for Gogol are classes literary creativity, his biography, even in the years of bureaucratic and pedagogical service, is a biography of the writer.

AT creative development Gogol can be divided into three periods:

1) 1829-1835 Petersburg period. The failure (the publication of Hanz Küchelgarten) was followed by the resounding success of the collection of romantic stories Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-1832). In January-February 1835, the collections Mirgorod and Arabesques were published;

2) 1835-1842 - the time of work on two important works: the comedy "The Government Inspector" and the poem "Dead Souls". The beginning of this period was the creation of the first edition of the Inspector General (December 1835, set in April 1836), the end was the publication of the first volume of Dead Souls (May 1842) and the preparation of the Works in 4 volumes ( went out of print in January 1843). During these years, the writer lived abroad (since June 1836), twice visiting Russia to organize literary affairs;

3) 1842-1852 - the last period of creativity. Its main content was the work on the second volume of "Dead Souls", which took place under the sign of intense religious and philosophical searches. The most important events of this period were the publication in January 1847 of the publicist book "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" and the burning by Gogol in February 1852 of personal papers, among which, apparently, was the manuscript of the second volume of the poem.

The first period of Gogol's work (1829-1835) began with the search for his own theme, his own path in literature. In the long lonely evenings, Gogol worked diligently on stories from Little Russian life. Petersburg impressions, bureaucratic life - all this was left in reserve. His imagination took him to Little Russia, from where he had longed to leave so recently, so as not to "perish in insignificance." Gogol's literary ambition was fueled by acquaintance with famous poets: V.A. Zhukovsky, A.A. Delvig, Pushkin's friend P.A. Pletnev. In May 1831, the long-awaited acquaintance with Pushkin took place.

The revenge for the experienced bitterness of an unsuccessful debut was the publication in September 1831 of the first part of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. Pushkin announced to the public about a new, "unusual for our literature" phenomenon, guessing the nature of Gogol's talent. He saw in the young romantic writer two qualities that seemed to be far from each other: the first is “real gaiety, sincere, without affectation, without stiffness”, the second is “sensitivity”, the poetry of feelings.

After the release of the first part of "Evenings ..." Gogol, inspired by success, experienced an extraordinary creative upsurge. In 1832 he published the second part of the collection, worked on everyday story"The Terrible Boar" and the historical novel "Hetman" (excerpts from these unfinished works were published in the "Literary Gazette" and the almanac "Northern Flowers") and at the same time wrote articles on literary and pedagogical topics. Let us note that Pushkin highly valued this side of Gogol's genius, considering him the most promising literary critic of the 1830s. However, it was "Evenings ..." that remained the only monument of the initial period of Gogol's work. In this book, according to the writer himself, "the first sweet moments of young inspiration" are captured.

The collection includes eight stories, differing in subject matter, genre and style features. Gogol used the widely used in the literature of the 1830s. the principle of cyclization of works. The stories are united by the unity of the scene (Dikanka and its environs), the figures of storytellers (all of them are well-known people in Dikanka who know each other well) and the “publisher” (the beekeeper Rudy Panko). Gogol hid under the literary "mask" of a publisher-commoner, embarrassed by his entry into the "great society" of literature.

The material of the stories is truly inexhaustible: these are oral stories, legends, tales both in modern and in historical themes. “If only they listened and read,” the beekeeper says in the preface to the first part, “but I, perhaps, are too lazy to rummage through, and there will be ten such books.” Gogol freely juxtaposes events, "confuses" the centuries. The goal of the romantic writer is to know the spirit of the people, the origins of the national character. The time of action in the stories “Sorochinsky Fair” and “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt” is modernity, in most works (“May Night, or the Drowned Woman”, “The Missing Letter”, “The Night Before Christmas” and “The Enchanted Place”) - XVIII century, finally, in "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" and "Terrible Revenge" - the 17th century. In this kaleidoscope of eras, Gogol finds the main romantic antithesis of his book - the past and the present.

The past in "Evenings ..." appears in the halo of the fabulous and wonderful. In it, the writer saw the spontaneous play of good and evil forces, morally healthy people, not affected by the spirit of profit, practicality and mental laziness. Gogol depicts the Little Russian people's festive and fair life. The holiday, with its atmosphere of freedom and fun, the beliefs and adventures associated with it, take people out of the framework of their usual existence, making the impossible possible. Previously impossible marriages are concluded (“Sorochinsky Fair”, “May Night”, “The Night Before Christmas”), all evil spirits are activated: devils and witches tempt people, trying to prevent them. A holiday in Gogol's stories is all kinds of transformations, disguise, hoaxes, beatings and exposing secrets. Gogol's laughter in "Evenings..." is humorous. Its basis is juicy folk humor, able to express comic contradictions and incongruities in a word, which are many in the atmosphere of a holiday, and in ordinary, everyday life.

The originality of the artistic world of stories is associated, first of all, with the widespread use of folk traditions: exactly at folk tales, semi-pagan legends and traditions, Gogol found themes and plots for his works. He used the belief about a fern that blooms on the night before the Ivan Kupala holiday, legends about mysterious treasures, about selling the soul to the devil, about flights and transformations of witches ... In many stories there are mythological characters: sorcerers and witches, werewolves and mermaids and, of course, devil, to whose tricks popular superstition is ready to ascribe every evil deed.

"Evenings ..." is a book of fantastic incidents. The fantastic for Gogol is one of the most important aspects of the people's worldview. Reality and fantasy are bizarrely intertwined in the people's ideas about the past and the present, about good and evil. The writer considered the propensity for legendary-fantastic thinking to be an indicator spiritual health of people.

The fantasy in Evenings is ethnographically authentic. Heroes and narrators of incredible stories believe that the whole area of ​​the unknown is inhabited by evil spirits, and the "demonological" characters themselves are shown by Gogol in a reduced, everyday guise. They are also "Little Russians", they just live on their own "territory", from time to time fooling ordinary people, interfering in their life, celebrating and playing with them. For example, the witches in The Lost Letter play fools, offering the narrator's grandfather to play with them and return, if they're lucky, their hat. The devil in the story "The Night Before Christmas" looks like "a real provincial attorney in uniform." He grabs a month and burns, blowing on his hand, like a man who accidentally grabbed a hot frying pan. Declaring his love to the "incomparable Solokha", the devil "kissed her hand with such antics, like an assessor at the priest's." Solokha herself is not only a witch, but also a villager, greedy and loving admirers.

Folk fiction is intertwined with reality, clarifying the relationship between people, sharing good and evil. As a rule, the heroes in Gogol's first collection defeat evil. The triumph of man over evil is a folklore motif. The writer filled it with new content: he affirmed the power and strength of the human spirit, capable of curbing the dark, evil forces that rule in nature and interfere in people's lives.

The “positive” heroes of the stories were ordinary Little Russians. They are depicted as strong and cheerful, talented and harmonious. Jokes and pranks, the desire to play pranks are combined in them with a willingness to fight evil spirits and evil for their happiness. In the story "Terrible Revenge" the heroic-epic image of the Cossack Danila Burulbash, the predecessor of Taras Bulba, is created. His main features are love for the motherland and love of freedom. In an effort to curb the sorcerer punished by God for a crime, Danila dies like a hero. Gogol uses the folk poetic principles of depicting a person. His characters are bright, memorable personalities, they do not have contradictions and painful reflection. The writer is not interested in the details, the particulars of their lives, he seeks to express the main thing - the spirit of liberty, the breadth of nature, the pride that lives in "free Cossacks". In his image, this, according to Pushkin, is "a singing and dancing tribe."

With the exception of the story "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt", all the works in Gogol's first collection are romantic. The romantic ideal of the author manifested itself in the dream of good and fair relations between people, in the idea of ​​national unity. Gogol created his poetic utopia on Little Russian material: it expresses his ideas about what the life of the people should be like, what a person should be. The colorful legendary fantasy world of "Evenings ..." differs sharply from the boring, petty life of Russian inhabitants, shown in "The Inspector General" and especially in "Dead Souls". But the festive atmosphere of the collection is broken by the invasion of dull "existents" - Shponka and his aunt Vasilisa Kashpo-rovna. Sometimes sad, elegiac notes also sound in the text of the stories: it is through the voices of the narrators that the voice of the author himself breaks through. He looks at the sparkling life of the people through the eyes of a Petersburger, fleeing from the cold breath of the ghostly capital, but foresees the collapse of his utopia and therefore mourns for joy, "a beautiful and fickle guest"...

"Evenings ..." made Gogol famous, but, oddly enough, the first success brought not only joy, but also doubts. The year of the crisis was 1833. Gogol complains about the uncertainty of his position in life and literature, complains about fate, does not believe that he is capable of becoming a real writer. He assessed his condition as a "destructive revolution", accompanied by abandoned plans, the burning of barely begun manuscripts. Trying to move away from the Little Russian theme, he conceived, in particular, a comedy based on St. Petersburg material "Vladimir of the Third Degree", but the plan was not realized. The reason for the acute dissatisfaction with oneself is the nature of laughter, the nature and meaning of the comic in Little Russian stories. He came to the conclusion that he laughed in them "to entertain himself", to brighten up the gray "prose" of St. Petersburg life. But a real writer, according to Gogol, should do "good": "laughing for nothing", without a clear moral goal - is reprehensible.

He was intensely looking for a way out of the creative impasse. The first symptom important changes, which took place in the writer, became a story based on Little Russian material, but completely different from the previous ones - “The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”. 1834 was fruitful: "Taras Bulba", "Old World Landowners" and "Viy" were written (all were included in the collection "Mirgorod", 1835).

Mirgorod is an important milestone in Gogol's creative development. The scope of artistic "geography" has expanded: the legendary Dikanka has given way to the prosaic county town, the main attraction of which is a huge puddle, and a fantastic character is Ivan Ivanovich's brown pig, who brazenly stole Ivan Nikiforovich's petition from the local court. The very name of the city contains an ironic meaning: Mirgorod is both an ordinary provincial city and a special, closed world. This is a "mirror" in which everything is the other way around: normal relations between people are replaced by strange friendship and ridiculous enmity, things are crowding out a person, and pigs and ganders become almost the main actors "persons" ... In an allegorical sense, "Mirgorod" is a world art, overcoming the county "topography" and "local" time: the book shows not only the life of "non-smokers", but also the romantic heroism of the past, and the terrible world of natural evil, embodied in "Viya".

In comparison with "Evenings..." the composition of the second collection of Gogol's prose is more transparent: it is divided into two parts, each of which includes two stories, united by contrast. The antithesis of the everyday story "Old World Landowners" is the heroic epic "Taras Bulba". Moral-descriptive, imbued with the author's irony "The Tale ..." about the two Ivans is contrasted with the "folk tradition" - the story "Viy", close in style to the works of the first collection. Gogol abandoned the literary mask of the "publisher". The author's point of view is expressed in the composition of the collection, in the complex interaction of romantic and realistic principles of depicting characters, in the use of various speech masks.

All stories are permeated with the author's thoughts about the polar possibilities of the human spirit. Gogol is convinced that a person can live according to the lofty laws of duty, which unites people in a "partnership", but can lead a meaningless, empty existence. It leads him into the small world of a manor or town house, to petty worries and slavish dependence on things. In the life of people, the writer discovered opposite principles: spiritual and bodily, social and natural.

Gogol showed the triumph of spirituality in the heroes of the story "Taras Bulba", primarily in Taras himself. The victory of the bodily, material - in the inhabitants of the "old-world" estate and Mirgorod. Natural evil, before which prayers and spells are powerless, triumphs in Vii. Social evil that arises among people as a result of their own efforts - in moralistic stories. But Gogol is convinced that social evil, in contrast to the "earthly", natural, surmountable: in the subtext of his works, the thought of the author's new intentions is guessed - to show people the absurdity and randomness of this evil, to teach people how it can be overcome.

The hero of the story "Viy" Khoma Brut looked into the eyes of Viy, natural evil, and died of fear of him. The world that opposes man is terrible and hostile - the more acute is the task for people to unite in the face of world evil. Self-isolation, alienation lead a person to death, because only a dead thing can exist independently of other things - such is the main thought of Gogol, who approached his great works: The Government Inspector and Dead Souls.

The second period of Gogol's work (1835-1842) opens with a kind of "prologue" - "Petersburg" stories "Nevsky Prospekt", "Notes of a Madman" and "Portrait", included in the collection "Arabesques" (1835; the author explained its title as follows: "a confusion , mixture, porridge "- in addition to stories, the book includes articles various subjects). These works linked two periods of the writer's creative development: in 1836 the story "The Nose" was published, and the story "The Overcoat" (1839-1841, published in 1842) completed the cycle.

Gogol finally submitted to the Petersburg theme. The stories, different in plots, themes, heroes, are united by the place of action - Petersburg. But for the writer, this is not just a geographical space. He created a bright image-symbol of the city, both real and ghostly, fantastic. In the fates of the heroes, in the ordinary and incredible incidents of their lives, in the rumors, rumors and legends that fill the very air of the city, Gogol finds a mirror image of the St. Petersburg "phantasmagoria". In St. Petersburg, reality and fantasy easily change places. Everyday life and the fate of the inhabitants of the city - on the verge of plausible and wonderful. The unbelievable suddenly becomes so real that a person cannot stand it and goes crazy.

Gogol gave his interpretation of the Petersburg theme. His Petersburg, in contrast to Pushkin's (" Bronze Horseman”), lives outside of history, outside of Russia. Gogol's Petersburg is a city of incredible events, a ghostly-absurd life, fantastic events and ideals. Any metamorphoses are possible in it. The living turns into a thing, a puppet (such are the inhabitants of the aristocratic Nevsky Prospekt). A thing, object or part of the body becomes a “face”, an important person in the rank of state councilor (the nose that disappeared from a collegiate assessor Kovalev, who calls himself a “major”). The city depersonalizes people, distorts their good qualities, sticks out bad ones, changes their appearance beyond recognition.

Like Pushkin, Gogol explains the enslavement of man by St. social positions: in the ghostly life of the city, he discovers a special mechanism that is set in motion by the "electricity" of the rank. Chin, that is, the place of a person, determined by the Table of Ranks, replaces human individuality. There are no people - there are positions. Without a rank, without a position, a Petersburger is not a person, but neither this nor that, "the devil knows what."

The universal artistic technique that the writer uses when depicting Petersburg is synecdoche. The replacement of the whole by its part is an ugly law by which both the city and its inhabitants live. A person, losing his individuality, merges with a faceless multitude of people like him. Suffice it to say about the uniform, tailcoat, overcoat, mustache, whiskers, to give an exhaustive idea of ​​the motley St. Petersburg crowd. Nevsky Prospekt - the front part of the city - represents the whole of St. Petersburg. The city exists, as it were, by itself, it is a state within a state — and here the part crowds out the whole.

Gogol is by no means an impassive chronicler of the city: he laughs and is indignant, ironic and sad. The meaning of Gogol's depiction of Petersburg is to point out to a person from a faceless crowd the need for moral insight and spiritual rebirth. He believes that in a creature born in the artificial atmosphere of the city, the human will still win over the bureaucratic.

In "Nevsky Prospekt" the writer gave a kind of intro to the entire cycle of "Petersburg Tales". This is both a "physiological essay" (a detailed study of the main "artery" of the city and the city "exhibition"), and a romantic short story about the fate of the artist Piskarev and Lieutenant Pirogov. They were brought together by Nevsky Prospekt, the “face”, “face” of St. Petersburg, which changes depending on the time of day. It becomes either business, or “pedagogical”, or “the main exhibition the best works person." Nevsky Prospekt is a model of a bureaucratic city, a “moving capital”. Gogol creates images of puppets, carriers of sideburns and mustaches of various stripes and shades. Their mechanical collection marches along Nevsky Prospekt. The fates of the two heroes are the details of Petersburg life, which made it possible to tear off the brilliant mask from the city and show its essence: Petersburg kills the artist and favors the official, both tragedy and ordinary farce are possible in it. Nevsky Prospekt is “deceitful at all times,” just like the city itself.

In each story, Petersburg opens from a new, unexpected side. In "Portrait" - this is a seductive city that ruined the artist Chartkov with money and light, ghostly fame. In Notes of a Madman, the capital is seen through the eyes of the titular councilor Poprishchin who has gone mad. The story "The Nose" shows the incredible, but at the same time very "real" St. Petersburg "odyssey" of Major Kovalev's nose. "Overcoat" - "life" of a typical Petersburger - petty official Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin. Gogol emphasizes the alogism of the ordinary, everyday and familiar. The exceptional is only an appearance, a "deception" that confirms the rule. Chartkov's madness in "Portrait" is part of the general madness that arises as a result of people's desire for profit. The madness of Poprishchin, who imagined himself to be the Spanish king Ferdinand VIII, is a hyperbole in which the maniacal passion of any official for ranks and awards is emphasized. In the loss of the nose by Major Kovalev, Gogol showed special case the loss of the bureaucratic mass of their "face".

Gogol's irony reaches deadly force: only the exceptional, the fantastic, can lead a person out of moral stupor. In fact, only the insane Poprishchin recalls the "good of mankind." The nose would not have disappeared from the face of Major Kovalev, so he would have walked along Nevsky Prospekt in a crowd of people like him: with noses, in uniforms or in tailcoats. The disappearance of the nose makes it an individuality: after all, with a “flat spot” on the face, one cannot appear in front of people. Don’t die Bashmachkin after scolding a “significant person”, it is unlikely that this “significant person” in a ghost tearing off his overcoat from passers-by seemed to be this petty official. Petersburg in the image of Gogol is a world of familiar absurdity, everyday fantasy.

Madness is one of the manifestations of St. Petersburg absurdity. In every story there are mad heroes: these are not only crazy artists Piskarev (“Nevsky Prospekt”) and Chartkov (“Portrait”), but also officials Poprishchin (“Notes of a Madman”) and Kovalev, who almost went crazy when he saw his own nose walking around St. Petersburg. Even the "little man" Bashmachkin, who has lost hope of finding an overcoat - the "bright guest" of his dull life - is seized by madness. The images of madmen in Gogol's stories are not only an indicator of the illogicality of public life. The pathology of the human spirit allows you to see the true essence of what is happening. A Petersburger is a “zero” among many “zeros” like him. Only madness can make it stand out. The madness of heroes is their "finest hour", because, only having lost their mind, they become personalities, lose the automatism inherent in a person from the bureaucratic mass. Madness is one of the forms of people's rebellion against the omnipotence of the social environment.

The stories "The Nose" and "The Overcoat" depict two poles of Petersburg life: absurd phantasmagoria and everyday reality. These poles, however, are not as far apart as it might seem at first glance. The plot of "The Nose" is based on the most fantastic of all urban "stories". Gogol's fantasy in this work is fundamentally different from folk poetry in the collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. There is no fantastic source here: the nose is part of St. Petersburg mythology that arose without the intervention of otherworldly forces. This mythology is special - bureaucratic, generated by the almighty invisible - the "electricity" of the rank.

The nose behaves as befits a “significant person” with the rank of state councilor: he prays in the Kazan Cathedral, walks along Nevsky Prospekt, calls in the department, makes visits, is going to leave for Riga on someone else’s passport. Where it came from, no one, including the author, is interested. It can even be assumed that he “fell from the moon”, because, according to Poprishchin, the madman from the Notes of a Madman, “the moon is usually made in Hamburg”, but is inhabited by noses. Any, even the most delusional, assumption is not excluded. The main thing is different - in the "two-facedness" of the nose. According to some signs, this is exactly the real nose of Major Kovalev (his sign is a pimple on the left side), that is, a part that has separated from the body. But the second "face" of the nose is social.

The image of the nose is the result of an artistic generalization that reveals the social phenomenon of St. Petersburg. The meaning of the story is not that the nose became a man, but that he became a fifth-class official. The nose for others is not a nose at all, but a “civilian general”. They see the chin - there is no person, so the substitution is completely invisible. People for whom the essence of a person is exhausted by his rank and position do not recognize a mummer. The fantasy in The Nose is a mystery that does not exist anywhere and is everywhere, it is the terrible irrationality of Petersburg life itself, in which any delusional vision is indistinguishable from reality.

The plot of "The Overcoat" is based on the most insignificant Petersburg incident, the hero of which was the "little man", the "eternal titular adviser" Bashmachkin. Buying a new overcoat turns out to be a shock for him, commensurate with the loss of the nose from the face of Major Kovalev. Gogol did not limit himself to a sentimental biography of an official who tried to achieve justice and died from "official scolding" by a "significant person." At the end of the story, Bashmachkin becomes part of St. Petersburg mythology, a fantastic avenger, a "noble robber."

The mythological "double" of Bashmachkin is a kind of antithesis to the nose. The nose-official is a reality of St. Petersburg, which does not confuse or terrify anyone. "A dead man in the form of an official," "ripping off from all his shoulders, without disassembling the rank and rank, all sorts of overcoats," terrifies living noses, "significant persons." In the end, he gets to his offender, “one significant person”, and only after that he forever leaves bureaucratic Petersburg, which offended him during his lifetime and is indifferent to his death.

In 1835, the ideas of Gogol's comedy "The Inspector General" and the poem "Dead Souls" arose, which determined the entire subsequent fate of Gogol the artist.

The place of the "Inspector General" in his work and the level of artistic generalization to which he aspired while working on the comedy, Gogol revealed in the "Author's Confession" (1847). The "thought" of comedy, he stressed, belongs to Pushkin. Following Pushkin's advice, the writer "decided to put together everything bad in Russia ... and laugh at everything at once." Gogol defined a new quality of laughter: in "The Government Inspector" it is "high" laughter, due to the height of the spiritual and practical task facing the author. The comedy was a test of strength before working on a grandiose epic about modern Russia. After the creation of The Inspector General, the writer felt "the need for a complete essay, where there would be more than one thing to laugh at." Thus, the work on The Inspector General is a turning point in Gogol's creative development.

The first edition of the comedy was created in a few months, by December 1835. Its premiere, attended by Nicholas I, took place on April 19, 1836 on the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg (the first edition was also published in 1836). The performance made a depressing impression on Gogol: he was dissatisfied with the performance of the actors, the indifference of the public, and most of all with the fact that his plan remained misunderstood. “I wanted to get away from everything,” the writer recalled.

However, it was not the flaws in the stage interpretation of The Inspector General that were the main reason for the author's acute dissatisfaction. Gogol was inspired by an unrealizable hope: he expected to see not only a stage action, but also a real action produced by his art - a moral shock to the spectators-officials who recognized themselves in the "mirror" of the work. The disappointment experienced by the writer prompted him to “explain” with the public, comment on the meaning of the play, especially its finale, and take a critical look at his own work. Two comments were conceived: “An excerpt from a letter written by the author after the first presentation of The Inspector General to a writer” and the play “Theatrical tour after the presentation of a new comedy”. These "explanations" with the public Gogol completed in 1841-1842. Dissatisfaction with the play led to its thorough revision: the second, revised edition was published in 1841, and the final edition of The Government Inspector, in which, in particular, the famous epigraph appeared “There is nothing to blame on the mirror, if the face is crooked”, was published in 1842 . in the 4th volume of "Works".

On June 6, 1836, after all the turbulent emotions caused by the premiere of The Government Inspector, Gogol went abroad with the intention of "deeply considering his duties as an author, his future creations." Gogol's main work during his stay abroad, mainly in Italy, which lasted for 12 years (he finally returned to Russia only in 1848), was Dead Souls. The idea of ​​the work arose in the autumn of 1835, at the same time the first sketches were made. However, the work on the "pretty long novel" (its plot, according to Gogol, belonged to Pushkin, like the "thought" of "The Government Inspector") was crowded by other ideas. Initially, he wanted to write a satirical adventurous novel, showing in it “although from one side all of Russia” (letter to A.S. Pushkin dated October 7, 1835).

Only after leaving Russia, the writer was able to seriously set to work on " Dead souls". A new stage in the implementation of the plan began in the summer of 1836. Gogol thought over the plan of the work, redoing everything written in St. Petersburg. Dead Souls was now conceived as a three-volume work. Having strengthened the satirical beginning, he sought to balance it with a new, non-comic element - lyricism and high pathos of the author's digressions. In letters to friends, defining the scale of his work, Gogol assured that "all Russia will appear in it." Thus, the former thesis - about the image of Russia "although from one side" - was canceled. Gradually, the understanding of the Dead Souls genre also changed: the writer moved further and further away from the traditions of various genre varieties of the novel - adventurous and picaresque, moralistic, travel novel. From the end of 1836, Gogol called his work a poem, abandoning the previously used designation of the genre - a novel.

Gogol's understanding of the meaning and significance of his work has changed. He came to the conclusion that his pen is guided by the highest predestination, which is due to the significance of "Dead Souls" for Russia. There was a firm conviction that his work is a feat in the writing field, which he accomplishes despite the misunderstanding and hostility of his contemporaries: only descendants will be able to appreciate it. After Pushkin's death, the shocked Gogol perceived "Dead Souls" as a "sacred testament" of a teacher and friend - he became more and more strengthened in the thought of his chosen one. However, work on the poem progressed slowly. Gogol decided to arrange a series of readings of the unfinished work abroad, and at the end of 1839-beginning of 1840 in Russia, where he came for several months.

In 1840, immediately after leaving Russia, Gogol fell seriously ill. After his recovery, which the writer described as a "miraculous cure," he began to regard Dead Souls as a "holy work." According to Gogol, God sent an illness on him, led him through painful trials and brought him to the light so that he could fulfill his highest plans. Inspired by the idea of ​​moral achievement and messianism, during 1840 and 1841. Gogol completed work on the first volume and brought the manuscript to Russia. At the same time, the second and third volumes were being considered. Having passed through censorship, the first volume was published in May 1842 under the title "The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls."

The last period of Gogol's work (1842-1852) began with a sharp controversy around the first volume of Dead Souls, which reached its climax in the summer of 1842. Judgments about the poem were expressed not only in the press (the most striking episode was the dispute between V. G. Belinsky and K. S. Aksakov about the genre, and in fact about the meaning and significance of "Dead Souls"), but also in private correspondence, diaries, in high-society salons and student circles. Gogol closely followed this "terrible noise" raised by his work. Having gone abroad again after the publication of the first volume, he wrote the second volume, which, in his opinion, should have explained to the public the general idea of ​​his work and removed all objections. Gogol compared the first volume with the eve of the future "great poem", which is still being built and will have to solve the riddle of his soul.

Work on the second volume, which lasted ten years, was difficult, with interruptions and long stops. The first edition was completed in 1845, but did not satisfy Gogol: the manuscript was burned. After that, the book Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends was prepared (out of print on the eve of 1847). From 1846 to 1851, the second edition of the second volume was being created, which Gogol intended to publish.

However, the book was never published: its manuscript was either not fully completed or burned in February 1852, along with other personal papers, a few days before the writer's death on February 21 (March 4), 1852.

“Selected passages from correspondence with friends” is a vivid religious, moral, social and aesthetic manifesto of Gogol. This book, like other religious and moral writings of the 1840s, summed up the results of his spiritual development, revealed the drama of his human and literary life. Gogol's word became messianic, prophetic: he created extremely sincere and merciless confessions and, at the same time, passionate sermons. The writer was inspired by the idea of ​​spiritual self-knowledge, which was supposed to help him to know "the nature of man in general and the soul of man in general." Gogol's coming to Christ is logical: in him he saw "the key to the soul of man", "the height of knowledge of the soul." In the "Author's Confession" the writer noted that "he spent several years inside himself", "educated himself as a student." In the last decade of his life, he sought to realize a new creative principle: first create yourself, then a book that will tell others how to create yourself.

However, the last years of the writer's life were not only stages of climbing the ladder of high spirituality, which was revealed to him in civil and religious deeds. This is the time of a tragic duel with himself: having written almost all of his works of art by 1842, Gogol passionately desired, but could not melt the spiritual truths revealed to him into artistic values.

The artistic world of Gogol took shape by the beginning of the 1840s. After the publication of the first volume of Dead Souls and The Overcoat in 1842, Gogol the artist was essentially transformed into Gogol the preacher, striving to become the spiritual mentor of Russian society. This can be treated in different ways, but the very fact of Gogol's turn and movement towards new goals, far beyond the limits of artistic creativity, is beyond doubt.

Gogol always, with the possible exception of his early works, was far from "pure" art. Even in his youth, he dreamed of a civic career and, barely entering literature, he realized his writing as a kind of civic service. The writer, in his opinion, should be not only an artist, but also a teacher, a moralist, a preacher. Note that this feature of Gogol distinguishes him from contemporary writers: neither Pushkin nor Lermontov considered the "teaching" function to be the main task of art. Pushkin generally rejected any attempts of the “mob” to force the writer to any kind of “service”. Lermontov, an unusually sensitive "diagnostician" of the spiritual vices of his contemporaries, did not consider the task of the writer to "treat" society. On the contrary, all of Gogol's mature work (from the mid-1830s) was inspired by the idea of ​​preaching.

However, his sermon had a special character: Gogol is a comic writer, his element is laughter: humor, irony, satire. "Laughing" Gogol expressed in his works the idea of ​​what a person should not be and what his vices are. The world of the writer's most important works - "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" (excluding the second, unfinished volume) - is the world of "anti-heroes", people who have lost those qualities, without which a person turns into a useless "non-smoker" or even a "hole in humanity".

In the works written after the first collection "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", Gogol proceeded from the idea of moral norm, an example, which is quite natural for a moralist writer. In the last years of his life, Gogol formulated the ideals that inspired him already at the beginning of his writing career. A wonderful imperative addressed both to “man in general” and to “Russian man”, and at the same time Gogol’s own writer’s creed, we find, for example, in the outline of an unsent letter to V. G. Belinsky (summer 1847): “A person needs to remember that he not a material beast at all, but a high citizen of a high heavenly citizenship. As long as he does not live at least a little bit the life of a heavenly citizen, until then earthly citizenship will not come into order either.

Gogol the artist is not an impassive "protocolist". He loves his heroes even “black”, that is, with all their shortcomings, vices, absurdity, is indignant at them, sad with them, leaving them hope for a “recovery”. His works have a pronounced personal character. The personality of the writer, his judgments, open or veiled forms of expression of ideals are manifested not only in direct appeals to the reader (“The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”, “Petersburg” stories, “Dead Souls”), but also in how Gogol sees his heroes, the world of things that surround them, their daily affairs, everyday troubles and "vulgar" conversations. "Objectivity", love for things, a heap of details - the whole "corporeal", material world of his works is shrouded in an atmosphere of secret teaching.

Like a wise mentor, Gogol did not tell readers what “good” was, but pointed out what was “bad” in Russia, in Russian society, in Russian people. The firmness of his own convictions should have led to the negative example remaining in the mind of the reader, disturbing him, teaching without teaching. Gogol wanted the person depicted to “remain like a nail in the head, and his image seemed so alive that it was difficult to get rid of him”, so that “insensitively” (our italics - Auth.) “good Russian characters and qualities of people” became attractive, and "bad" - so unattractive that "the reader will not love them even in himself, if he finds them." “This is what I believe my writing is,” Gogol emphasized.

Let us note that Gogol did not treat his readers in the same way as Pushkin (remember the images of the reader? - "friend", "enemy", "friend" of the Author - in "Eugene Onegin") or Lermontov (the image of an indifferent or hostile contemporary reader, whom "Sparkles and deceptions amuse", created in the poem "Poet"). For Gogol, a moralist writer, the reader of his books is a “student” reader whose duty is to listen attentively to the “lesson” taught by a wise and demanding mentor in an entertaining way.

Gogol loves to joke and laugh, knowing how and with what to attract the attention of his "students". But his main goal is that, after leaving the "class", leaving the Gogol "room of laughter", that is, closing the book written by him, a comic writer, the reader would bitterly think about the imperfections of the country in which he lives, people who differ little from himself, and, of course, about his own vices.

Please note: the moral ideal of the writer, according to Gogol, should be manifested "insensitively", not in what he says, but in how he portrays. It is precisely by depicting, grasping and enlarging in his heroes even “infinitely small”, “vulgar” (that is, everyday, familiar) traits of their characters that Gogol teaches, instructs, preaches. His moral position is expressed in the artistic word, which has a double function: it contains both a sermon and a confession. As Gogol never tired of emphasizing, addressing a person, and even more so instructing him, you need to start with yourself, with self-knowledge and spiritual self-improvement.

Gogol is often called "Russian Rabelais", "Russian Swift". Indeed, in the first half of the XIX century. he was the largest comic writer in Russia. Gogol's laughter, like the laughter of his great predecessors, is a formidable, destructive weapon that spared neither the authorities, nor the estate arrogance of the nobility, nor the bureaucratic machine of the autocracy. But Gogol's laughter is special - it is the laughter of a creator, a moralist-preacher. Perhaps not one of the Russian satirists laughed at public vices and shortcomings of people, inspired by such clear moral goals as Gogol. Behind his laughter are ideas about what should be - about what people should be like, the relationship between them, society and the state.

From the school bench, many applicants know for sure that Gogol "denounced", "exposed" "officials, serfdom and serf-owners", but often do not think about what inspired the writer, what "wonderful power" made him "look around the whole huge rushing life, look at it through laughter visible to the world and invisible, unknown to it tears ”(“ Dead Souls ”, volume one, ch. 7). Many modern readers of Gogol do not have a clear answer to the questions: what were the civil and moral ideals of the writer, in the name of which he criticized serfdom and feudal lords, what is the point Gogol's laughter?

Gogol was a staunch conservative, a monarchist who never raised the question of changing the social system, never dreamed of social upheavals, of public freedom. The very word "freedom" is alien to Gogol's vocabulary. The Russian monarch for the writer is *- "the anointed of God", the embodiment of the power of the state and the highest moral authority. He is able to punish any social evil, to find and "heal" any distortion in human souls.

In the works of Gogol, Russia appears as a country of bureaucratic officials. The image of the Russian bureaucracy created by the writer is an image of a clumsy, absurd government alienated from the people. The meaning of his criticism of the bureaucracy is not to "destroy" it with laughter - the writer criticizes the "bad" officials who do not fulfill the duties assigned to them by the tsar, who do not understand their duty to the Fatherland. He had no doubt that any official who had "full knowledge of his office" and did not act "outside the limits and boundaries specified by law" was necessary to govern a vast country. The bureaucracy, according to Gogol, is good for Russia if it understands the significance of the "important place" it occupies, and is not smitten with self-interest and abuse.

Vivid images of landlords - "sky-smokers", "lying stones" - are created in many of Gogol's works: from the story "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt" to "Dead Souls". Meaning satirical image landowners-serfs - in pointing out to the nobles, who own land and people, "the height of their rank", their moral duty. Gogol called the nobility a "vessel" containing "moral nobility, which should be spread over the face of the entire Russian land in order to give an idea to all other estates why the highest estate is called the color of the people." The Russian nobility, according to Gogol, "in its true Russian core is beautiful, despite the temporarily overgrown foreign husk, it is" the color of our own people.

A real landowner in the understanding of Gogol is a good master and shepherd of the peasants. In order to live up to his destiny, determined by God, he must spiritually influence his serfs. “Declare them the whole truth,” Gogol advised the “Russian landowner” in Selected Bridges from Correspondence with Friends, “that the soul of a person is more precious than anything in the world and that, first of all, you will see to it that no one of them ruins his soul and did not betray it to eternal torment "The peasantry, thus, was considered by the writer as an object of touching care of a strict, highly moral landowner." Heroes of Gogol - alas! are far from this bright ideal.

For whom, then, did Gogol write, who “always stood for public enlightenment,” to whom did he preach? Not to the peasantry, "farmers", but to the Russian nobility, who deviated from their direct mission, deviated from the right path - serving the people, the tsar and Russia. In the "Author's Confession", the writer emphasized that "before enlightening the people themselves, it is more useful to enlighten those who have an immediate collision with the people, from whom the people often suffer."

Literature in moments of social disorder and unrest, according to Gogol, should inspire the whole nation with its example. To set an example, to be useful are the main duties of a true writer. Such is the most important point in Gogol's ideological and aesthetic program, the leading idea of ​​the mature period of creativity.

The singularity of Gogol the artist is that in not a single completed and published work of art he expresses his ideals directly, does not instruct his readers openly. Laughter is the prism through which his views are refracted. However, even Belinsky rejected the very possibility of a straightforward interpretation of Gogol's laughter. “Gogol depicts not messengers, but a person in general ... emphasized the critic. “He is as much a tragedian as a comedian ... he rarely happens to be one or the other, ... but most often he is merged with both.” In his opinion, “comic is a narrow word for expressing Gogol's talent. His comedy is higher than what we are accustomed to call comedy. Calling Gogol's heroes "monsters," Belinsky astutely remarked that they were "not cannibals," "in fact, they have neither vices nor virtues." Despite their fancifulness and comic inconsistencies, enhanced by laughter, people are quite ordinary, not only "negative heroes" of their era, but people "in general", recreated with extraordinary "size".

The heroes of Gogol's satirical works are "failed" people, worthy of ridicule and regret at the same time. Creating their most detailed social and everyday portraits, the writer pointed out what, in his opinion, "sits" in every person, regardless of his rank, rank, class affiliation and specific circumstances of life. Concrete historical and eternal, universal features in Gogol's heroes form a unique alloy. Each of them is not only a “human document” of the Nikolaev era, but also an image-symbol of universal human significance. After all, according to Belinsky, even "the best of us are not alien to the shortcomings of these monsters."

Disappointment and failure. - Impromptu to Lübeck. - Commencement and retirement. - The first successes in the literary field. - "Evenings on the farm." - Acquaintance with Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Karamzin. - In the circle of Nezhin comrades. - "Old-world landowners", "Taras Bulba", "Marriage", "Inspector". - Gogol in the role of an unsuccessful adjunct in the department of history. - Attraction to literature. - Belinsky predicts a glorious future for Gogol. - "Inspector" is put on stage at the personal request of Emperor Nicholas I

Young people were very worried when approaching the capital. They, like children, constantly leaned out of the carriage to see if the lights of Petersburg were visible. When at last these lights flickered in the distance, their curiosity and impatience reached their highest point. Gogol even froze his nose and caught a runny nose, constantly jumping out of the carriage in order to better enjoy the longed-for spectacle. They stopped together, in furnished rooms, and immediately had to get acquainted with various practical troubles and petty annoyances that meet inexperienced provincials when they first appear in the capital. These squabbles and trifles of everyday life had a depressing effect on Gogol. In his dreams, Petersburg was a magical land where people enjoy all material and spiritual benefits, where they do great things, wage a great fight against evil - and suddenly, instead of all this, a dirty, uncomfortable furnished room, worries about how to have a cheap lunch, anxiety at the sight of how quickly the purse is emptied, which seemed inexhaustible in Nizhyn! Things went even worse when he began to fuss about the realization of his cherished dream - to enter the public service. He brought with him several letters of recommendation to various influential persons and, of course, was sure that they would immediately open the way for him to useful and glorious activity; but, alas, here again a bitter disappointment awaited him. The "patrons" either coldly received the young, awkward provincial and limited themselves to promises, or offered him the most modest places on the lower rungs of the bureaucratic hierarchy - places that did not at all correspond to his proud plans. He tried to enter the literary field, wrote the poem "Italy" and sent it under a false name to the editors of "Son of the Fatherland". This poem, very mediocre both in content and in thought, written in a romantically pompous tone, was, however, printed. This success encouraged the young author, and he decided to publish his poem "Hans Küchelgarten" (an imitation of "Louise" Voss), conceived and, in all likelihood, even written by him in the gymnasium. Secretly from his closest friends, hiding under the pseudonym of V. Alova, he published his first large literary work (71 pages in 12 parts of a sheet), distributed copies to book sellers on commission and, with bated breath, awaited the verdict of the public about him. Alas! Friends either said nothing at all about "Hans", or spoke of him indifferently, and in the "Moscow Telegraph" appeared a short but caustic note by Polevoy that the idyll of Mr. It would be best to leave Alov under wraps forever. This first unfavorable response from critics excited Gogol to the depths of his soul.

He rushed to the bookstores, took away from the booksellers all the copies of his idyll and secretly burned them.

Another attempt to achieve fame, made by Gogol at the same time, led to the same sad results. Remembering his successes on the stage of the Nezhinsky Theater, he decided to become an actor. The then director of the theater, Prince Gagarin, instructed his official Khrapovnitsky to test him. Khrapovnitsky, an admirer of pompous recitation, found that he read too simply, inexpressively, and could only be accepted for "exit roles."

This new failure finally upset Gogol. Climate change and material deprivation, which he had to experience after a proper life in Little Russia, affected his naturally poor health, while all the troubles and disappointments were felt even more strongly; in addition, in one letter to his mother, he mentions that he fell hopelessly and passionately in love with some beauty, inaccessible to him due to her social position. As a result of all these reasons, Petersburg became disgusting to him, he wanted to hide, to run away, but where? To return home, to Little Russia, having achieved nothing, having done nothing - it was unthinkable for a proud young man. Even in Nizhyn, he dreamed of a trip abroad, and now, taking advantage of the fact that a small amount of money from his mother fell into his hands, he, without thinking twice, boarded a ship and went to Lubeck.

Judging by his letters of this time, he did not associate any plans with this trip, had no specific goal, except for a little sea bathing treatment; he simply ran away from the troubles of Petersburg life in youthful impatience. Soon, however, letters from his mother and his own prudence forced him to change his mind, and after a two-month absence he returned to St. Petersburg, ashamed of his boyish antics and at the same time deciding to courageously continue the struggle for existence.

At the beginning of the next 1830, happiness finally smiled at him. His story “Basavryuk, or the Evening on the eve of Ivan Kupala” appeared in Svinin’s “Notes of the Fatherland”, and soon after he received a modest position as an assistant clerk in the department of appanages. His long-standing desire to benefit society by being in the public service has come true, but what a difference between a dream and reality! Instead of doing good to the whole state, spreading truth and goodness everywhere, eradicating lies and abuses, the modest assistant to the clerk had to copy and file boring papers about various petty matters that did not interest him at all. It is clear that the service very soon tired him, he began to treat her carelessly, often did not show up for office. Less than a year later, he was asked to retire, to which he gladly agreed: at this time, literary works absorbed all his thoughts. In the course of 1830 and 1831, several of his articles appeared in the then temporary publications, almost still without the author's signature: "The Teacher", "The Success of the Embassy", an excerpt from the novel "Hetman", "A Few Thoughts on the Teaching of Geography", "Woman". In the midst of the cold and uneasiness of Petersburg life, his thoughts involuntarily rushed to his native Little Russia; a circle of Nizhyn comrades, with whom he maintained a friendly relationship from the very arrival, shared and supported his sympathies. Every week they got together, talked about their dear Ukraine, sang Little Russian songs, treated each other to Little Russian dishes, reminisced about their schoolboy tricks and their merry trips home for the holidays.

Singing doors, earthen floors, low rooms lit by a stub in an old candlestick, roofs covered with green mold, cloudy oaks, virgin thickets of bird cherry and sweet cherry, yachontic seas of plums, intoxicatingly luxurious summer days, dreamy evenings, clear winter nights - all these from childhood familiar native images again resurrected in Gogol's imagination and asked to be poured into poetic works. By May 1931, he had ready stories that made up the first volume of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

At the beginning of 1931, Gogol met Zhukovsky, who treated the novice writer with his usual kindness and warmly recommended him to Pletnev. Pletnev looked at his literary work with great sympathy, advised him to publish the first collection of his stories under a pseudonym, and himself invented a title for it, calculated to arouse public interest. In order to provide for Gogol financially, Pletnev, who at that time was an inspector of the Patriotic Institute, gave him the position of senior history teacher at this institute and provided him with lessons in several aristocratic families. For the first time, Gogol was introduced to the circle of writers in 1832 at a holiday given by the famous bookseller Smirdin on the occasion of moving his shop to a new apartment. The guests presented the host with various articles that made up the almanac "Housewarming", which also contains Gogolev's "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich."

Gogol met Pushkin in the summer of 1831. Thanks to him and Zhukovsky, he was introduced to the Karamzins' living room, which constituted, as it were, a link between the literary and court-aristocratic circles, and met Prince Vyazemsky, the family of Count Vielgorsky, and the ladies-in-waiting, whose beauty was considered to be Alexandra Osipovna Rosseti, later Smirnova. All these acquaintances could not help but have an influence on Gogol, and a very strong influence. The young man, who had meager worldly experience and even meager theoretical knowledge, had to submit to the charm of more developed and educated people. Zhukovsky, Pushkin - there were names that he used to pronounce with reverence from childhood; when he saw that these names hide not only great writers, but truly kind people who received him with the most sincere friendliness, he became attached to them with all his heart, he willingly accepted their ideas, and these ideas formed the basis of his own world outlook. In relation to politics, the convictions of the literary-aristocratic circle in which Gogol had to move can be characterized by the word: liberal-conservative. All fundamental reforms of the Russian way of life and the monarchical system of Russia were unconditionally rejected by him, as absurd and harmful, and yet the constraints imposed by this system on individuals revolted him; he wanted more scope for the development of individual abilities and activities, more freedom for individual estates and institutions; all abuses of bureaucratic arbitrariness met with his condemnation, but he rejected both an energetic protest against these abuses and any search for their root cause. However, it must be said that political and social questions never came to the fore in that brilliant society that gathered in the Karamzins' drawing room and grouped around the two great poets. Zhukovsky, both as a poet and as a person, shunned questions that agitated life, leading to doubt or denial. Pushkin spoke with disdain about the "pathetic skeptical thinking of the last century" and about the "harmful dreams" that exist in Russian society, and he himself rarely indulged in such dreams.

"Not for worldly excitement,

Not for self-interest, not for battles "...

the chosen ones of fate were born, gifted with the genius of creativity. Priests of pure art, they must stand above the petty passions of the mob. From this point of view, serving art was considered by the circle and all the works that came out from the pen of the writers of that time. Fresh poetry, cheerful humor of the first works of Gogol attracted the attention of the luminaries of the then literature, who did not suspect what public importance will have further works of the witty "Khokhlo", what interpretation will be given to them by a new, already emerging literary generation.

Acquaintances in the aristocratic world did not force Gogol to cut ties with his classmates at the Nezhinsky Lyceum. A rather diverse society gathered in his small apartment: former lyceum students, among whom Kukolnik was already famous, aspiring writers, young artists, the famous actor Shchepkin, some modest official unknown to anyone. All sorts of anecdotes from the life of the literary and bureaucratic world were told here, humorous couplets were composed, and newly published poems were read. Gogol read unusually well and expressively. He was in awe of Pushkin's creations and shared with his friends every novelty that came out from under his pen. Poems Yazykov acquired in his reading a special convexity and passion. A lively, witty interlocutor, he was the soul of his circle. Every vulgarity, self-satisfaction, laziness, every untruth, both in life and especially in works of art, met in him a well-aimed accuser. And how subtle observation he showed, noting the slightest traits of slyness, petty quest and selfish pomposity! Among the most heated disputes, animated conversations, he did not leave the ability to follow everyone around him, to notice hidden mental movements and secret motives of each. Often an anecdote heard by chance, apparently not at all an interesting story of some visitor, was planted in his soul by his images, which grew into entire poetic works. So, a joke about some clerk, a passionate hunter, who saved up money with great difficulty to buy a gun and lost this gun, gave rise to the idea of ​​​​"The Overcoat" in him; the story of some old man about the habits of madmen gave rise to the Notes of a Madman. The Dead Souls themselves owe their origin to a chance story. Once, in the middle of a conversation, Pushkin conveyed to Gogol the news that some adventurer was engaged in buying dead souls from the landlords in the Pskov province and was arrested for his tricks. “You know,” Pushkin added, “this is excellent material for a novel, I’ll deal with it somehow.” When, some time later, Gogol showed him the first chapters of his Dead Souls, at first he was a little annoyed and told his family: “You have to be more careful with this Little Russian: he robs me so that you can’t even scream.” But then, carried away by the charm of the story, he completely reconciled himself with the thief of his idea and encouraged Gogol to continue the poem.